Background
Edward O"Donovan Crean was born in 1887 in Liverpool, the son of the oil refiner James Crean (b 1853) and Catherine O"Halloran.
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Edward Crean
Edit ProfileEducation
Ampleforth Abbey and College. Edward Crean attended and boarded at the catholic Ampleforth Abbey and College.
Career
He is one of a small number of Lions players to have never played for their national side. He had a number of older siblings. Crean played for Liverpool Football Club, a rugby club, which later became Liverpool and Street Helens Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and is not to be confused with its association football equivalent.
He played in the Oxford University clash in the 1908/09 season and played alongside the two Irish internationals, G. Pinion and M.G. Garry.
He also saw the beginnings of potentially the greatest side of Liverpool that contained three international captains (Poulton-Palmer of England, Lloyd of Ireland and Turner of Scotland). Despite having not been selected for the England team, in 1910 Crean was selected for the first official British tour to South Africa (in that it was sanctioned and selected by the four Home Nations official governing bodies).
In the Crean joined the Royal Naval Air Service, which by the end of the war had merged with the Royal Flying Corps to become the Royal Air Force. By the end of the war he had risen to the rank of captain, and was elected to the Royal Aeronautical Club of the United Kingdom on 19 June 1919.
